Union head coach Bradley Carnell, center, gestures to players next to Union defender Nathan Harriel in an Oct. 26 playoff game against the Chicago Fire at Subaru Park. Mandatory Credit: James Lang-Imagn Images
The Philadelphia Union have their roster moves from 2025 sorted. They know their first opponent in the CONCACAF Champions Cup. They know their participation status in the U.S. Open Cup.
The Union have 25 players under contract for 2026. They have five international spots spoken for. They have flexibility in terms of the model they can use to build their roster.
What they don’t have is a ton of time. The start of the 2026 preseason will convene in about five weeks. The team will head off to Spain for preseason training on Jan. 17, with a camp in Clearwater, Florida, to follow. The MLS season opens Feb. 21, and the CONCACAF Champions Cup will likely begin that week, either before or after. (The Union were drawn with Trinidad and Tobago champion Defence Force FC; winner of that two-leg gets Club America in the next round, so it might well be a short stay.)
With not much time – and, to be fair, not all that many offseason issues relative to their peers – here are five questions that will follow the 2025 Supporters’ Shield winners into the offseason.
The biggest and most pertinent question for the Union is who will answer the other questions. Ernst Tanner is on administrative leave as MLS reopens an investigation into his workplace conduct. That deprives the Union of the principal decision maker for the better part of the last decade, someone who has executed some impressive transfer market coups, at the height of his peak season.
The organization is operating as though Tanner’s investigation won’t be wrapped up any time soon, potentially dragging on into the start of the MLS season. That means this window is likely in the hands of others.
At the club’s year-end press conference, coach Bradley Carnell and Director of Academy and Professional Development Jon Scheer detailed a diffuse decision-making process. That includes assistant sporting director Matt Ratajczak and director of scouting Chris Zitterbart contributing to decisions that include input from data-driven departments across the organization.
“This is a collective and collaborative effort in a process to be remain prepared, deliberate and focused on making the strongest possible decisions for the club,” Carnell said.
What exactly are those decisions? Well, they’re potentially – and fortuitously – few. With the signing of Ezekial Alladoh completed, the big-ticket item of the winter is set. The roster needs refinement, with the midfield in particular in need of a little depth. Expect a Homegrown or two to be added.
There really are only two big decisions on the horizon. Anything else would be either be completing business already underway or additions on the margins.
Here’s a look at the team’s depth chart at the moment:
The Union need another center back. They have Jakob Glesnes, who arrested what looked like a one-way decline in 2024 with a Best XI season in 2025. He’s healthy, but he’ll be 32 in March. It’s time for succession planning.
Olwethu Makhanya had a breakout season, but at 21, that’ll be an invitation for transfer offers from overseas, particularly if he can find a way into the South African national team set up ahead of its World Cup berth this summer.
Neil Pierre is waiting in the wings. But to think the 18-year-old can make a Makhanya-like jump this young is overly optimistic. He’ll get minutes next season, but the 2025 MLS Next Pro Defender of the Year won’t be a 2,000-minute player right away. He made one appearance for the Union in 2024.
“We're happy with how Neil's progressed the last couple of years,” Scheer said. “Like all of our players, I think we're always looking at the balance between where they fall within the Union II setup and MLS Next Pro, and then how that translates into MLS. We're really high on the potential of Neil Pierre, but we're also going to make sure that he's in the best possible environment to reach and maximize that potential.
“I think you'll see here soon, we're still looking at other center back options, but Neil for the future is one we still have a lot of belief in, and we're looking forward to seeing what the best environment is for him to continue to develop.”
The Union will probably look for a defender in the mode of Ian Glavinovich, whom they brought in last year on loan and whose Union career was scuttled by a meniscus tear in April. Reports have linked them to 22-year-old Colombian Genier Martinez.
The X factor in all this is Nate Harriel. Or rather Frankie Westfield. They’re an either/or proposition at right back, which could mean more of Harriel centrally. Both are MLS starters, and in terms of reliability in a big game – say Club America in March – Harriel would be No. 3 on the center back depth chart at the moment.
Center back is the first big decision. The second is the future of Tai Baribo.
Baribo is in the last option year of his contract. He’ll turn 28 in January. Since being freed from Jim Curtin’s doghouse, where he resided for the first year of his 3.5-year contract, he’s scored 25 goals in 44 league games and 37 goals in 57 appearances in all competitions, including MLS All-Star MVP in 2025 and the Leagues Cup Golden Boot in 2024.
Tanner hasn’t in the past always extended second contracts to players in that age range (see Uhre, Mikael). Carnell’s quote, when asked if Baribo is a guy he’d want to keep around with a new contract, was less than robust: “We are planning with Tai going forward into the new season. Hopefully with the run of games that we have, we're going to have to have the added competition, the added depth, and I believe that always brings out the best in our strikers. We're planning with Tai right now.”
The Israel international has a soft landing spot back home if he wanted to go back there. He has his green card, so trading him within MLS is feasible. The Union have signed two club-record forwards, in Bruno Damiani and Alladoh, since his arrival. His base salary of $700,000 is manageable, even a reasonable raise leaving him still a TAM player. Baribo and his wife also just welcomed their first child this fall. So a lot of moving pieces for player and club.
Cavan Sullivan played eight minutes in 2024, on a team that had a clear starting No. 10 in Daniel Gazdag, the club’s all-time leading scorer.
Sullivan played 440 minutes in all competitions in 2025, in a formation with two openings for No. 10s.
In 2026, the Union will have a readymade need for a No. 10 thanks to Quinn Sullivan’s ACL tear last September. They also – and Carnell’s viewpoint of this may vary – could use a secondary plan of attack against teams that effectively check the Union’s desire to hit on the counter (see Westfield in the New York City FC playoff ouster).
So what is Cavan's role in all of it?
“I hope we surpass the 400 minutes again with Cavan,” Carnell said. “We went from 8 to 440, which is quite the progression in anybody's language in a team. So we'll see how that all goes in this offseason.”
Sullivan impressed with the U.S. at the Under-17 World Cup. He’s off in England in December for an assessment with Manchester City, the club he’ll join when he turns 18, which will be in September of 2027.
For the second straight winter, the Union’s challenge in finding midfield help will be to ensure that Cavan’s path to minutes isn’t unduly blocked.
No one probably expected the Union to part ways with Gazdag or Jack McGlynn last year. Stability is often an illusion. If someone materializes with a number the club can’t turn down for Makhanya or throws a wild amount of cash in-league for the services of Kai Wagner (like a post-Jordi Alba Miami), the Union can’t afford not to listen. Changes will come, and often unexpectedly.
Short of Baribo, there’s not an obvious trade candidate inside MLS. (Markus Anderson might have more utility for another team than to the Union, but that’s a marginal play in a world where David Vazquez only was worth $500,000.)
The Union could reinforce the squad with pieces from around MLS on the free-agent market. But the last two times the Union took flyers – Ben Bender in 2025, Sam Adeniran in 2024 – didn’t work. The Union’s roster last year had just three players (Bender, Indiana Vassilev and Milan Iloski) who have played for another MLS club. The notion of them reinforcing their ranks with a veteran third goalie or a well-traveled center back or even a midfield piece to offer some change of pace isn’t the Union’s roster-building model.
What do they have bandwidth for? One of the challenges that Tanner articulated when Curtin was the coach was the narrow cost/benefit window: It’s hard to spend just a little bit on a marginal addition and then find playing time for them. Put another way, the team that has the most points in MLS over the last six seasons is so good that it’s expensive to find a player who can really make an impact.
They’ve tidied up their roster some to be able to take swings (i.e. not using an international spot on a third-string goalie.) Maybe they can find a midfielder near the point where Jesus Beuno was when he arrived, a young, raw talent who will benefit from some time at Union II. Maybe they can add a more possession-heavy player who will be useful in lineups late in games while chasing, a kind of latter-day Ilsinho.
But the first step each time for the Union is to look from within first.
“We have to plan, and we have to have a deep roster, and there has to be a lot of competition,” Scheer said. “So Bradley mentioned that we'll always be looking from within first in terms of what a roster looks like, but we're going to continue to evaluate what the landscape looks like across MLS, internationally, and see how we can supplement our roster to make sure that we're in a position where we're prepared to deal with the amount of games were headed into come 2026.”
